skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the point of confusion revolves around the definition of a (real) "business".

If someone accepts paypal payments for a garage sale or transient lemonade stand, is that a real business?

People accept cash and checks for many things that might be considered commercial, and banks don't have a problem with low volumes of commercial-transaction-related deposits being made to personal accounts. It's primarily the account owner's responsibility to pay taxes and do any other necessary reporting. I believe banks do primary reporting for money laundering and terrorism purposes and back-up reporting for tax purposes, but none of that generally involves freezing accounts.

People expect paypal to work like an easier means of check or cash payment, and when it turns out it doesn't work like that and the account gets frozen, people are understandably pissed off. The commercial/private transaction distinction is fairly arbitrary to begin with.
http://intotweets.com is another product that is making use of the pinterest layout. It displays tweets with in place content, such as video, images, or website previews.

I'm still undecided if it's a good thing or not as to the experience it provides.
Closer to 2 in 100: 2 shuttle losses in 135 flights, plus 1 catastrophic failure out of 32 missions in the pre-shuttle era.
Dale, Thanks! Work in progress, skipped the tagline & extra text on the frontpage as long as we didn't see a clear winner yet...
"Hi, quick question: Which number is halfway between 100 and 10,000?"

"1000. No, wait..."

(I might actually say that)
> A phone number is like a crappy, public password for people to call a number that may or may not be associated with you.

A phone number is just an address. That most numbers don't have ingress filtering due to standard operating procedure (and our public commons being owned by private ad-spewing corporations) doesn't change this fact.

You can try all you want to call my GV number, it will route all callers to voicemail except for whitelested numbers.
Hacker News for iOS 2.0 Live
Ask HN: How much can a student ask as a first time freelance web developer?
Hi,

I'm met some people who are founding a startup. They would like me to develop their idea. I'm a student just now "officially" learning ICT, but got some years experience with amateur webdevelopment.

It's a website that takes an expensive mandatory time-consuming activity and offers to do it online. You can do it when you want so you have more "time with the kids". They are looking for 2M euro funding and the plan is to turn breakeven after 1 year. For year 1 they estimated the total IT-related costs at 50K euro.

We talked a little about wages and concluded that I would count my hours and would be paid more than the minimum (10 euro/hour). Payment follows after each done module/feature. I think they have no idea how much they should give and that they would rather like that I ask for a certain amount.

I hear a lot of numbers. Should I go for more than 20/hour? Advice please :-)
> The little round plastic pads under a MBP I bought about a year ago are falling off, they were just glued.

How did you think they managed to attach chunks of plastic to a chunk of aluminum with no visible fasteners and no wiggle (as a "click-in" connection would exhibit)? Glue is probably the best way to attach those feet. The use of glue is not indicative of a lack of quality control. Falling off? Well, that could be.
The main mission (Dragon/ISS) wasn't affected, but a secondary payload (an ORBComm test satellite) was left in the Dragon's insertion orbit, and didn't get the scheduled secondary boost --- apparently because, after the delayed orbital insertion, the reboost would have gone too close to ISS, according to an ORBComm press release:

www.orbcomm.com/Collateral/Documents/English-US/ORBCOMM%20Launches%20Prototype%20OG2%20Satellite%20FINAL.pdf
The dragon module is meant to be able to save the crew at any stage of the launch.
> I have never seen anyone . . .

I have. I see it all the time, mostly in online discussion. No, I don't maintain a database of every such discussion in which I've participated, tagged with metadata about the fallacies employed in various discussions.

> not even the most corrupt media industry lobbyist or the most position-distorting, bought-and-paid-for politician, argue complete absolutes like that.

That's because they generally prefer to avoid speaking in absolutes except in specific, rare cases. The implications are obvious, even when their phrasing allows for what they think constitutes plausible deniability.

> More importantly, I have certainly never seen anyone genuinely interested in changing copyright law for the better promoting such a position.

It's not the people who want to change copyright law for the better that I'm most worried about. It's the people who want to maintain the status quo, plus add more restrictions, that are the biggest problem. Maybe you haven't said such things, and maybe you're interested in improving things in your own misguided way, but (for instance) Chris Dodd is only interested in improving the position of the MPAA -- and I'm pretty sure he has a hell of a lot more sway with Congress than you.

> There are alternatives to the mess that is today's implementation of copyright that don't involve killing the entire principle.

Yep -- and they're great stepping stones on the way to eliminating prior restraint of the free act of creation.
That's a popular misconception, IIRC. Actually, in thermonuclear weapon the bulk of energy comes from fission. [1] Fusion is technically only used to get the high energy neutrons to get the bulk of fissionable material to undergo fission. So, ironically, calling it a "fusion bomb" is very much like calling your car an electric hybrid.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermonuclear_weapon
Google Launches Credit Cards for Small Businesses
Definitely still alpha (as they disclaim). Login doesn't always work, and when it does it sometimes forgets I'm logged in when moving from page to page..
> HTML shouldn't feature in javascript code IMHO.

That's my beef above everything, createElement/DOM should be avoided. But for Google it's par for the course, their Google Closure introduction tutorial does just this even though they offer a templating system.
I don't believe anyone has ever been punished for misfiling. Part of the problem is that you have to show that it was not filed by mistake, which is pretty hard to prove.
I somehow enjoyed this a lot more than a lot of the tech press interviews with VCs, unknown analysts, etc.
Android implemented it years ago. My point was simply that "one small feature that no-one has implemented well" is pretty much revisionist nonsense.
As someone currently on an extended trip (1-2 years total, been travelling for 4+ months thus far) I'm not sure I'd actively encourage my kids to do this before college. My wife and I left our corporate jobs after saving for 3 years and paying off school loans.

We're able to spend a bit more and travel to more places as a result of having "real" jobs before our departure. This also gave us a taste of our day to day with our chosen professions and an excellent chance to make changes (based on real experience) if desired.

That said, I'd certainly recommend it for just about anyone who is interested. We've learned (basic) Spanish, tons of geography, and about the diversity of cultures in South America. We've also seen many amazing sites. I really wish this was more common for Americans.
What we really need is straight up DNS for phones.
One way to make the transition easier- get a job offer from a tech firm out here. Then if you're still unsure about moving out here to start a company, you can use that as a stepping stone to make the transition more comfortable.

If you can't manage to get a single job offer, I wouldn't recommend moving out here to start a company on your own. The bar is much, much, higher for starting a company than getting a job as a developer.
This heading is totally bogus. For me, homeless means not having a home, and the means to be homed is a distance target. This fellow will always have the means to get a home. As him to sleep under a bridge in the middle of the cold New York winter, and tell me if he is still homeless.
Hiring trends: Which tech skills are most in demand
Isn't having two factories, one to produce a 555 and the other to produce an ATtiny, the waste of resources? I personally prefer to only have to keep one chip in stock; the factory-calibrated RC oscillator is more accurate than what I would build out of discrete components anyway.

(Also, an ATtiny is not an Arduino. The Arduino chips cost like $5, an ATtiny is 50 cents. ATtinys have much less flash, EEPROM, and ROM. But can still produce a nice square wave :)
> And the first thing I always do is look for early exits. This has always given me the most bang for my buck in making unintelligible code understandable.

Ouch. It will be kind of amusing if we ever work on the same code - I frequently start a bug fix by refactoring to introduce as many early exits as possible. I find guard clauses so much easier to understand than nested conditionals that sometimes refactoring it like this is the only way I can understand the code at all. I would love to see a blog post where you compare different styles.

OTOH, If you're talking about things other than guard clauses then I think we might have a much more similar viewpoint.
While I'm completely in favor of people learning new languages (because it's fun, not to mention the communication aspect), I'm not sure how much I believe this particular study.

They admit that this is a unique school for languages: from zero to fluency in just over a year, by practicing every waking hour of every day, at a pace not seen in any other language school. Do the medicine and science students used as the control group study as hard as this, and on the same deadline? Did they try looking at people who studied languages, but not at breakneck speed?

It seems to me that it's entirely possible, based on this data, that the causative factor is not that they studied languages, but that they studied so intently. I don't doubt that science students study hard, but language immersion schools can make it so everything you read, write, hear, or speak all day every day is 100% in the language you're studying. That's a hard feat to match: how do you make eating breakfast or checking email a medical lesson?
iPhone 5 review: Marveling at the existence of the greatest phone ever made
(I work at Deployd) Yes, that's pretty much right - an experienced back-end developer with a lot of time on their hands won't have much need for Deployd, but a front-end developer - or at least a developer who prefers to spend their time in the front-end - would definitely benefit from using it.

It's actually very different from Meteor. Meteor is a realtime library for unifying front-end and back-end logic, and Deployd is an API engine for scripting back-end logic.

In fact, with some hacking, you could probably get the two to work together; it's something that I want to try sometime down the road.
Finally on github, you should be too.
"Ultimately, though, the fact that we use fixed-wing aircraft today is a good indicator that flying saucers, while cool, just aren’t that functional."

This means that the article's author is very narrow minded.

He's logic:
We use fixed-wing aircraft today, so there is nothing we could discover tomorrow that would make us shift from fixed-wing to disc shape.

Why do people think they know it all? Or why do people think that today's knowledge will be true tomorrow?

Because this is the 16th century and we know the Geocentric model is true?
Yeah. Nomadic, maybe.
Delay in followup, but a followup nontheless!

No, there's no single 3rd party app that I trust as much as Facebook. I don't know who most of these these 3rd party developers are most of the time, and that unknown makes me distrust by default. Not to say I wouldn't use a FB app that provided a service to me that I desired - I have, and I do. My original point was that I don't think I could ever trust an app enough to be able to send private messages from my name without my consent to do so - every time it wants to. The few apps I do use have greatly restricted permissions from what the app developers originally asked me for.

However, don't let that comment drive the assumption that I inherently trust /Facebook/, either. I don't. I use FB with the clear understanding that they only know about me what I choose to tell them about me. I don't put anything on Facebook that I wouldn't print out and tape to a telephone pole as public information.

I don't use FB chat. Not because I inherently distrust it - I don't inherently "trust" it either, but that's not primarily why I don't use it. I just don't have a use case for it. Likewise for messaging - I don't have a use case for it in most cases. Why would I give my private messages to Facebook when I can just send an email to the person directly?

I tend not to use mobile FB apps either. Again not necessarily as a matter of trust but as a matter of use case. I usually just access it via browser, so I don't have any real reason to use a specific mobile app - I've tried them, and none of them really seem to be any better of an experience (to me) than just hitting the browser version.

So I've yet to find a compelling reason to trade my trust for a product or service through the platform, and frankly, it'd have to be a pretty awesome thing for me to make that trade-off.
> On the other hand, and contrary to the article, I think the current problem with the music industry is not due to copyright but due to financial monopolies (the labels) that are outmoded but hang on for dear live.

How do you think they maintain those monopolies? Hint: a lot of it is directly related to copyright monopolies. Think of the hundreds or thousands of recording artists who would abandon the labels if they could get back the ability to publish their own songs, rather than having to ask the label for permission due to copyright assignments and work-for-hire claims.

> Indeed here copyright is what would protect the artist from a label to just copy the music and selling it for profit.

Nonsense. Copyright creates a market for the transfer of copyright, which immediately plays into the hands of large-scale distributors by ensuring nobody can compete with them. The economies of their scale are not natural economies; they're economies created by an artificially high barrier to entry for competitors, and the artificial scarcity imposed on markets by copyright law is the primary advantage enjoyed by such large-scale distributors.

> Also, interestingly, Open Source would not work without copyright. That's right. The GPL, (to some extend) the Apache License, and many other licenses only work because of copyright, which grants the owner the right to license software to you under a license.

Well, jkn already answered this point, but I'll add an additional comment on this subject:

We'd be better off without copyleft licensing. Software does not have to be GPLed to be open source, and in fact the GPL and other copyleft licenses actually stand in the way of many open source projects making use of code distributed under those copyleft licenses.
I was immediately reminded of the xkcd standards comic http://xkcd.com/927/
You misundersand me. Failures are not due to inexperience. High failure rates are. If a single failure occurs in one out of eight launches, a double will occur once every sixty four. While I believe the Falcon is double fault tolerant, I don't believe for a minute that this is the first failure seen in a SpaceX launch. If they've seen only one other failure in their eight launches, their overall failure rate (resulting in loss of rocket, possibly cargo and crew) would be one in 64. That is nearly the failure rate of the Shuttle. With more experience, they may be able to lengthen their mean time to loss (MTTL) by improving the failure rate.
This is true, but a high-level language can avoid having to even make that check, making it "faster than C", in at least some sense of the phrase.
That's exactly how I listen to music too.
I've got a very small selection of albums I've listened to throughout my life and other than them my music churn has always been as high as possible, though typically a great album lasts a month or 2.
Yeah. Someone has asked that in the threads too: http://talk.webplatform.org/forums/index.php/172/why-is-this...
Apple-Style Counter
HelloFax's Joseph Walla might have found path to the paperless office (YC W11)
Maybe it has something to do with the fact that this is very relevant to matters such as business models and software development.
So there's no need for a woman to have children at all, but saying "do not have kids earlier than 30 isn't great advice. There's a measured correlation between maternal age and the incidence of Down's Syndrome and other trisomies - the longer a woman waits to have children, the higher the odds there will be a problem. Which is not to say that all women should have children as young as possible - it's just that there's no one blanket piece of advice that's universally good.
I would probably do the stick approach via something like a translucent overlay. I'm not sure the carrot approach makes sense to me personally because the rewards (no neck pain, etc.) are pretty intrinsic already.

I will definitely throw it up on github if I don't end up finding something else that already does it.

On a similar note, I have also been looking for something I could use to move my cursor between my monitors. I have a sort of a half-hexagon arrangement using 3 displays and it would be nice to be able to center the cursor on whatever one I am looking at.

I think there are applications out there that sort of do this, though, so I am hoping I luck out.
Bravo's Silicon Valley Season 1 - Geeks are Definitely the New Rock Stars
Last Year, Google & Apple Spent More On Patents Than On R&D
Show HN: Snake meets Zelda in a challenging mobile adventure
The Original Web Developer. Should have been Web Creator though.
You laugh but actually the phone was pretty much duct-taped to a base-ball cap ;)
I find the (almost) complete lack of gap years in the US really weird, and really unfortunate. I feel like people going on gap years is beneficial even to those people who don't go on them - it adds a different (and on the whole beneficial) dimension to first year student life.
I've gone seven years now without college, and I've found that my previously brazen attitude about not needing college has been tempered with a deeper understanding about what college will be able to give me, should I ever attend. Of course, the needs might well be met by the oncoming wave of MOOCs, but the idea that knowing what one wants out of something (in this case, college) before executing on it is a force multiplier to its effectiveness applies to a great many other things. Why not here?
So they added some bureaucracy and wrote an incremental diff system instead of using Oracle which allowed them to increase the number of machines handling traffic...

A long winded recruitment post with no technical details.
The saucer looks suspiciously like "Project Silver Bug"

http://www.foia.af.mil/shared/media/document/AFD-090218-169....

It appeared in many of the popular magazines of the time
http://blog.modernmechanix.com/issue/?magname=MechanixIllust...

IIRC it was cancelled because it was incredibly unstable. Had a tendency to spin like a top.
I find it quite sad that these elementary things don't work even for an alpha give the big names that are involved in the project.
Copyright suit, not patent.
You could talk about credible intervals, which is a similar thing.
Style is one thing, but if you use closures, you have to be a lot more careful about memory leaks.
I tried it out and some of the connections are dubious to say the least, for example for the photographer Robert Frank the first related artists is Timothy H. O'Sullivan, which has very little in common with Frank. The same was found with many other artist's I am familiar with. I guess it's just starting out and will improve with time, I presume if I were to create an account I would be able to feedback into the system to fix errors.

Painting seemed to fair much better in its relationships, possibly because the artists are more cleanly defined.
exactly. I'm surprised this is being so heavily discussed. I mean, if Telsa charged $63000 instead of $60000, no one would care. That 3000 covers the maintenance for 5 years. It is negligible in comparison to the cost of the vehicle.
Basic Concepts of Apache Maven
Am I the only one who got confused by the first sentence? "The Dragon spacecraft is on its way to the International Space Station this morning and is performing nominally...".

Is everything fine now, or is it not? "Nominally" in this sense to me means that something is amiss, but reading the rest of the article seems to imply that everything is on track.
These layouts work for social sites, where people want to feel that it's crowded. For other sites, it just looks ... well, crowded.
w3fools.com tried to kill w3schools and it couldn't do it.
I'm 30, and have a computer science degree, and am log(n) on the chart in many areas (but certainly not all). In almost all cases, the relevant experience came from me trying to do a side project that required knowledge I didn't have. I can install a database because I had to. I can program in functional languages because I was reading about them and I tried to use one for a side project.

The side projects don't even have to lead anywhere, but they get you to the point where you can say "ya, I can write a node.js server" and then you can do it on the job, and a few years later you're an expert.

This is definitely not the only way to acquire skills. I'm sure some people dig through books, or just focus on doing their job and still grow. But for me, side projects have always been the driving force.
Make Awesome: a magazine that focuses on people who are doing great things
I've played this game-- truly unique experience! Great work.
I'm calling it as a fake. The drawings are in the too-good-to-be-true category, and the Flying Saucer logo is hilarious. No updates since Sept 20, and published with only 4 pages scanned? Is there any evidence for this other than the Wordpress blog on which it appears?

Yes, I'll take small bets.
Ask HN: If you could ask Facebook Analytics any question, what would it be?
Wondering if you could sit down with the Facebook analytics team and ask or talk about anything, what would it be?
Still use your Windows NTP utility, upon occasion. Thank you.
Researchers use magnets to cause programmed cancer cell deaths
So you don't provide source code, or condone linux access. Why is that, what do you fear?
Ride-Sharing Startups Get California Cease-And-Desist Letters
NY Times Takes On Our Broken Patent System
I'm not sure where you get that sense of the word. Nominal = according to plan.
Simply gorgeous site design.
This one:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8640950/null-reference-ex...

In my case it manifested on ajax calls but not the initial page load. I had a custom grid that worked fine on the first load but blew up when the user tried to page or sort it. And it only happened on production, because the prod server had the component mentioned in the link installed, but the dev and stage servers didn't.

Luckily the guy administering the web servers tracked down the configuration difference, googled, and found the above link, and I was able to make a small change to my code to work around it, pre-calculating the url on the initial load and just referencing the resulting string on the ajax call (specifically, using lexical closure instead of calculating the url inside a lambda). That fixed it.

This was on MVC3.
Not really, if you'd built your model from a billion launches and 20 million failures, a dozen failures in a row won't change your priors much at all. You've built your model off of far less data.

How many failures are required to change your model from 2% to, say, 4%?